a speaking in flowers

a speaking in flowers is to be a growing and organic process, an art work /app —a biomimicry graphic translation of our relationships into flowering plant (angiosperms) as the principal of a novel design/communication paradigm UI for mobile conversations, a sort of living data set as a garden, forest, a nature of ones network/community/thoughts— experienced as a floricultural intrigue.

a speaking in flowers is ones own network—people, institutions, likes, videos, photos, ideas, conversations, chats, game scores all related to as a visual relationships, envisioned, encoded as a gardening enterprise, a network, a rhizomic gigantium of information and connections.

In terms of the overtly innovative and digital components, the piece is to be a collection of artistic apps for mobile communication, a speaking in flowers, an aesthetic virtual communication and mobile toolkit, a messaging application, adaptive to individual input, capable of evolving, sensing and making visible, networks of relationships, & a renewal meaning — emulations of flowers as symbolics, as carries of our intents and interactions — a flowering garden of contacts and blossoming cogency and agency.

This intent could accelerate into an engagement into a data aesthetics that could be applied to various other types of interactivity; it need not remain within the realm of social and intimate interactivity, though that would be the beginning of the investigation.

Our ability to generate information now far exceeds our capacity to understand it. Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century.

We live profoundly as networked beings. We are becoming more aware in each passing day of the primacy of relatedness, of networks, social, ecological, financial to the health of our individual selves.

Back in 1999 while I was a producer at the Banff centre I was working with morphogenetic programs and L-Systems. These are algorithms that model plant growth. Incredibly interesting and applicable to many processes, these algorithms are a form of biomimicry, the transferring of the knowledge and intelligence of the natural world to the technological world. The work that I eventually produced was shown at a number of European festivals including the Siemens Nixdorf museum in Paderborn, Germany.

The flower can be the central icon of that healthy networked singularity.

In terms of digital interactivity —a speaking in flowers is a development, layering of these preliminary ideas — we could (as one example) produce a mobile phone app that builds visuals --- flowers --- according to the emotional and content code of conversations and conversational threads, over a period of time or immediately — in other words you'd eventually be the custodian of a flower garden of conversations that you have had within your social, intimate and work networks. Each distinct flower a particular conversation or conversational thread, alive to the conversation as it changes, as it evolves. This would be the aesthetification of information — both social and emotional as well as work related. Each flower would contain both literally and in symbolic form the conversation or conversational and/or relationship thread.
Possibly if you have not talked to that person for a designated time span the flower would deteriorate, possibly the flowers can be pollinated by passing threads of others in your network, possibly these flowers could extend or be planted into gardens. The flowers not only created out of elements of tonal and speech recognition code, repetitions and patterns, but by texting and locational data.
A concurrent engagement would be the making of a low budget film essay combining cultural reflections, wonderous (& public domain archival botanical illustrations) and scientific explanations —an appreciation of the reproductive strategies of this most successful species, studying its manner of growth and interaction with its environment.

A long bibliography list could follow here, sufficient at this point to say that we will need to do considerable research —
On the associative: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Linked” & Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”, to“Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life”, to studies on GUI developments such as: “Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond”, Jesse James Garrett —“Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information”, Manuel Lima — and then there is the studies into the science of the angiosperms, the applications of biomimcry, L-Systems, morphogenetic program, speech recognition, etc.